Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Arun Ravindran
Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Arun Ravindran

Overview of this book

Building secure and maintainable web applications requires comprehensive knowledge. The second edition of this book not only sheds light on Django, but also encapsulates years of experience in the form of design patterns and best practices. Rather than sticking to GoF design patterns, the book looks at higher-level patterns. Using the latest version of Django and Python, you’ll learn about Channels and asyncio while building a solid conceptual background. The book compares design choices to help you make everyday decisions faster in a rapidly changing environment. You’ll first learn about various architectural patterns, many of which are used to build Django. You’ll start with building a fun superhero project by gathering the requirements, creating mockups, and setting up the project. Through project-guided examples, you’ll explore the Model, View, templates, workflows, and code reusability techniques. In addition to this, you’ll learn practical Python coding techniques in Django that’ll enable you to tackle problems related to complex topics such as legacy coding, data modeling, and code reusability. You’ll discover API design principles and best practices, and understand the need for asynchronous workflows. During this journey, you’ll study popular Python code testing techniques in Django, various web security threats and their countermeasures, and the monitoring and performance of your application.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Django Rest framework


Creating your website's API might seem trivial using the services pattern we learned in Chapter 3Models. However, real-world APIs need so much more functionality, such as web browsable documentation, authentication, serialization, and throttling, that you are better off using a toolkit such as Django Rest framework (DRF).

DRF is the most popular API toolkit for Django. It fits well with the Django architecture and reuses several familiar concepts such as generic views and model forms. Out of the box, the API is accessible and usable with a normal web browser, which makes testing and finding documentation easier for developers.

Improving the Public Posts API

Recall the services pattern example where we created a service to retrieve all the latest public posts? Now we shall reimplement it using the features provided by the DRF.

First, install DRF and add it to your INSTALLED_APPS. Then, mention your permission model in settings.py:

# Django Rest Framework settings 
REST_FRAMEWORK...